By Samuel Rubenfeld

Young people can claim much of the credit for electing Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States.

Notoriously the most unreliable of voters, 18 to 29 year olds turned out in record numbers on Election Night. Exit polls said young voters comprised 18 percent of the electorate this cycle this time, one point more than they did either time George W. Bush was elected, although turnout increased dramatically overall, with 130 million people casting ballots.

Simply by turning out, young people pushed Obama over the top in important battleground states. Young voters supported Obama by a more than 2-1 margin, according to exit polls. Fifty-six percent of white voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Obama, while 95 percent of African-American voters of the same age voted for Obama.

But their electoral clout transcended numbers counted in the ballot box.

They organized older, especially older white working-class, voters who hesitated supporting Obama throughout the primary season. Nationally, 40 percent of white voters over the age of 30 supported Obama, according to exit polls.

In suburban Philadelphia, Obama had an “organization to die for,” said Lawrence Levy, executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies, who visited the area during the primary season. There were people on every streetcorner in many of the key counties, he added.

The national suburban vote split evenly, with 50 percent voting for Obama and 49 percent voting for McCain, exit polls showed.

Getting young people on the ground to turn people out to vote, and allowing them to organize themselves, led to an even higher turnout, and it also led to Democratic gains in Congress, where they gained six Senate seats and 19 House seats, including taking the only seat in all of New England that was held by a Republican.

Students here got in on the act, as well. Thirty students joined 50 other college students from New York City to travel by bus to Penn State University for the weekend before Election Day to canvas students there in a county that went to Bush by 2,400 votes in 2004. Collectively, the group knocked on 21,414 doors on the campus grounds and the surrounding areas, said Robb Friedlander, a sophomore who is the co-president of Hofstra for Obama.

Centre County, this time, went to Obama by 7,700 votes. And amongst all Pennsylvania voters between the ages of 18 and 24, one-ninth of the vote in the state, Obama won 64 percent to 38 percent, according to the state’s exit polls.

“It made a huge impact,” Friedlander said. “When you look at the numbers, [8,000] more voters came out in Centre County and almost all of those came straight to Barack.”